by Jo Goodman
Rachel keenly felt their strained intimacy, though it was unclear to her whether Wyatt sensed the same thing. She credited the fact that he’d been married before with his ease for accommodation. He sometimes left the door open to the washroom when he was shaving or completing his morning ablutions. If he woke with an erection, he didn’t present it to her, but neither did he try to hide it. He wore a nightshirt to bed, although she suspected he preferred to sleep in his drawers alone. He didn’t intrude on her when she was dressing, but more than once in passing, he’d absently fasten a button that she’d missed or tuck a wayward strand of hair behind her ear.
He drew water for her bath, helped her heat it, then disappeared while she undressed. He’d return to the kitchen once she was in the tub and linger at the far side of the table until she needed help with rinsing the soap from her hair. When she reminded him that she had managed it alone for some time now, he merely asked her why she would want to go on that way. His point was well taken, and having him tip the pitcher so that water trickled, then cascaded, over her head, her face, and her shoulders was the one pleasure she could not bring herself to deny.
Her monthly courses came and went, and came again. The first time, Rachel accepted it as evidence that she wasn’t pregnant and felt a measure of relief. The second time, it was a reminder that given the conditions she’d set, she’d never be pregnant. What she felt then was something closer to resignation.
Wyatt kept his promise to take her to one of the open mines. He chose a mare for her from Redmond’s Livery that didn’t mind her lack of experience in the saddle and cared only about following Wyatt’s gelding. They rode in tandem on the trail; then he stopped and waited for her when they reached the summit.
The gaping hole in the ground startled Rachel and looking down into the massive crater caused her insides to turn over and her heart to sink. Fear of falling had little to do with her reaction. The pockmark on the land was like an obscenity. She’d never considered how the gold and silver were mined. She knew about panning, of course. One could hardly be born and raised in California without learning something about panning, but that was a rudimentary first step when gold-bearing gravel was in the shallows of a stream. To access gold and silver buried in ancient riverbeds deep in the heart of a mountain required more than a miner with a pan.
She had her eyes opened that morning to the larger consequence of Clinton Maddox’s rail spur. Monitors, some as long as eighteen feet, shot powerful jets of water from their nozzles. These cannons were aimed at the mountainside and tore into it with a terrible force, separating rock and earth. Gravel was carried through sluices in one direction, while the remaining dirt and debris were washed toward creeks and rivers. Some miners operated the giants, adjusting the nozzles to change the water pressure or swinging them to aim at a new location, while others stood at the bottom of the sluices where the riffles had been placed. Gold and silver ore fell out of the water, separated by the grooves in the boards. It was a panning operation of enormous proportions, as impressive in its ingenuity as it was hideous in its execution.
Wyatt took her to see the smelters where ore was melted to extract the gold or silver. The miners oversaw every part of the operation, including guarding it by setting up tent stations with a good view of the countryside and arming the men who took turns staying in them. The bricks were transported to the train by way of a trail that was so narrow two men could not navigate it walking abreast. Even mules were too smart to use it as it hugged the mountainside at a precarious angle.
The precious metals were not transported daily. The bricks were kept deep inside a mountain vault that was also guarded. The day they were moved to the train was always selected at random, and it occurred at varying frequencies but never more than three times in a month. It fell to Sid Walker to choose the day, and he did so by selecting one of two colored marbles from a chamois bag. The aquamarine cat’s-eye meant yes, and the black-and-yellow solid meant no. Bricks might be transported three days in a row one month and only one day during the next. Choosing the men to carry them was also done at random.
Rachel learned there had never been a robbery attempt on the trail and only one at the mine. The train was more vulnerable, but it had been two years since anyone had tried to stop a shipment and that had ended badly for the thieves.
It wasn’t merely the randomness of the operation or the deterrent that the guards represented that kept the mine safe, it was the fact that the extent of its success was virtually unknown outside Reidsville. Rachel could hardly fathom that an agreement forged more than twenty years earlier to keep the breadth of the discovery a secret was still being honored. It was the general opinion outside Reidsville that the gold and silver had been dug out of the mountains hugging the town long ago. Inexperienced miners never arrived in droves entertaining dreams of the mother lode, and as a result, there was never a massive exit.
Wealth might be gouged from the mountain in a torrent, but it only trickled out of the town. Rachel could not conceive of the size of the underground vault and how much of the town’s wealth still resided there. Wyatt had offered to take her inside, but one look at the sagging timbers shoring the entrance and the great yawning blackness in front of her made Rachel decide she did not need to see more. Even after he explained the adit was safe and only appeared otherwise to make it seem unimportant, she refused his offer.
“I have a great deal of money now, don’t I?” she asked one evening. They were sitting near the stove in the parlor, he with a book in his hands and his feet resting on a stool, and she with yards of lilac sateen spread over her lap. He had The Three Musketeers. She had Virginia Moody’s wedding dress.
Wyatt didn’t look up from his book. “Is that really a question in your mind?”
She held up the portion of the gown she was working on to the lamplight and examined her stitches. Finding them acceptable, she continued hemming. “It’s more that I’m looking for confirmation. It doesn’t seem quite real.”
“Then, yes, you do. A great deal.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I didn’t marry you for your money.”
“What about the Longabachs and the Walkers and Mr. Beaumont and—”
He glanced at her. “You’re not going to name the entire town, are you?” Before she answered, he said, “They do all right. Everyone does.”
“But they don’t have what I’ve been given.”
“Millions? No.” Wyatt closed the book around his index finger and regarded her curiously. “You’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the mine.”
It was true, but it didn’t follow that he should have known. “I have.”
“Do you wish I hadn’t taken you out there?”
She thought about that before she answered. “No,” she said finally. “It’s better to know.” She glanced up, saw he was still looking at her. “I mean, it’s better that I understand where my wealth comes from. Exactly.”
“You hated looking at that gouge in the mountain.”
She nodded. “It was…unexpected. I thought the ore was brought out from the inside.”
“Sometimes it is. There are areas in the Front Range riddled with tunnels, places where veins were dug out by driving a steel drill with a jack so the powder could be set. A man might be fortunate to move six or eight feet of earth a day, and that was if the tunnel didn’t collapse on his head. No one wanted to cut timber for shoring when they could be digging for gold, so the mines trapped men all the time. Owners didn’t care. Men cost less than timber.”
That was chilling. “So hydraulic mining is safer.”
“Comparatively. There are still dangers. Landslides. Flooding. Ned got hurt because a hose broke and the brass nozzle snapped around like a whiplash and struck him in the leg.”
Rachel shivered as the image crystallized.
“What’s this about, Rachel?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’ve just been thinking about that open wound in the mountains. I can’t quite
get it out of my mind.” She bent her head again. “It’s savage.”
“You’re not thinking about shutting down the operation, are you?”
She blinked, staring at him. “Could I?”
“Well, not because you’re an owner. You’d need me or the town to side with you and that’s never going to happen.”
“But there’s the spur,” she said.
“I really don’t want to have this conversation with you.”
Rachel pursed her mouth to one side. “I’m not going to do anything foolish, Wyatt. I know better than to bite the hand that feeds me, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do something. How many craters are there like the one you showed me today? How many acres does the mine own?”
“Acres? I have no idea. The property covers some forty square miles.”
Her lips parted. It was enormous beyond her comprehension.
“Would you like to see more of it?”
The way he asked the question, pushing slightly toward the edge of his chair, made her think he meant to take her outside this very minute. “Now?” she asked, disbelieving.
He nodded. “Give me a moment.” Wyatt set the book down and stood. “That chest that I brought from the Commodore…” He held up his hands to indicate width, depth, and height. “Do you know where—”
“Under the bed,” she said. “Johnny Winslow shoved it there.”
“That’s as good a place as any.”
Rachel stared after him, mystified. Not long after he disappeared, she heard the trunk scraping the floor as he dragged it out. The chest had been a curiosity when she’d first seen Johnny carrying it in. Wyatt wasn’t around at that precise moment to tell her what to do with it, and the fact that it had been locked prevented her from opening it. Johnny told her it came from under Wyatt’s bed at the hotel, so they agreed it should probably just rest there again. Until Wyatt brought it up, she’d forgotten all about it.
Wyatt returned to the parlor, carrying the chest on his shoulder. It was crafted of dark cherry wood with brass fittings on all of the corners. When it was polished it fairly gleamed, but sitting under the bed for the last six weeks had dulled it with dust. Wyatt set it down on the rug and hunkered beside it. He used a handkerchief to wipe it off, then dug the key from a pocket and unlocked it.
Curious, Rachel found herself leaning forward and inching toward the edge of her chair. When he opened the lid, it blocked her view of the contents. Frustrated now, she pushed Virginia Moody’s gown to the side and joined Wyatt on the floor. As soon as she dropped to her knees, he turned the chest so she could see its treasure.
Photographs. Hundreds of them. Some of them spilled over the top when he simply nudged the chest.
Rachel sat back on her heels, pressing her hands to her knees to keep them from sifting through the pictures before he gave her permission. “You’re the photographer for all of these?”
He nodded. “Most of them are old.”
“May I?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.”
She picked up several from among the fallen and looked through them. They were on heavy stock, so they felt thick in her hands. Some of the edges were slightly yellowed. The mountains loomed large in the pictures. On each of the three that she examined, the day was particularly clear and sunshine made the snow cover fairly gleam above the timberline. Two of the photographs were almost identical, but Rachel could see the shifting shadows and recognized the differences were a consequence of time. The third was taken at a different location; the camera’s aim was lower on the mountain.
Setting them aside, she picked up others. Wyatt began sorting through the pile and passed more to her as she finished one group. Occasionally, he offered explanations for what she was seeing.
“That range represents the edge of the mine property. There’s no mining that far away yet. No one even knows if there’s any gold or silver there. Here, look at these. This shows some of the digging and the aftermath of the explosions. You can see the veins.”
Rachel looked them over carefully, following the progress of the miners in photograph after photograph as they uncovered the mountain. It was not as delicate as peeling back the layers of an onion. Miners squatted on the banks of a stream, panning the water, looking for evidence of color in their pans. This process of watching the float helped them determine where to sink their shafts. The goal was always the same: to find the main vein.
Even more intriguing to Rachel were the faces of the miners who scored the mountain with their water cannons. There was an intensity of expression but a lack of animation. Wyatt explained it was partly an effect of photographing them over the course of a long exposure to the camera lens. If they moved or failed to hold their smile, their features appeared faded when the photograph was developed.
“Haven’t you ever sat for a photograph?” he asked. “There must be dozens of studios in Sacramento.”
“There are. I sat for one once. Foster insisted. He told me he thought his grandfather would appreciate it. I was reluctant, primarily because it was Foster’s suggestion, but rather than argue, I agreed. It was such a lot of fussing, and in the end, none of the photographs turned out well enough to suit Foster. It was a disappointment all around.” She held up a photograph of Sid Walker hunkered on the bank of a stream. He had both hands on his pan in front of him, his profile a perfect study of concentration as he stared at the contents. “You have a talent for it, though. You set your camera to capture the most telling moments.”
“Hardly moments,” he said. “Minutes.”
She smiled. “Well, minutes, then. It’s still remarkable.” She pointed to a photograph of a waterfall cascading over the lip of a rocky incline. Water droplets refracted sunshine and glistened like a thousand diamonds spilling out of the earth. “This is beautiful. The camera’s captured images that seem otherworldly.”
Wyatt thought she had described it exactly right. “I had a mule named Toad that could climb just about anything. He carried all the photographic equipment for me. That’s a tripod, camera, glass plates, chemicals, and the tent I used for a darkroom. Easily about a hundred and fifty pounds. When he couldn’t reach a tight spot, I’d carry it myself. Several trips, of course. We’d go up into the mountains for a few days at a time, mostly in the spring, but sometimes in the summer. It’s…” He hesitated, searching for the right word, and upon finding it, let it spill softly, reverently, from his lips. “…spiritual.”
Rachel was drawn into the crystalline blue that were his eyes, knew a feeling of being cleansed by his vision, and remained a captive of his voice. Moved off center, she didn’t try to fill the lingering silence, and slowly began to riffle through pictures near the bottom of the chest. The pastoral scenes alternated with rocky crags and sharp ledges, the deep forests with the naked beauty above timberline. The gouges made by the miners were a startling contrast to the ones made by the natural erosion of wind and water. There were photographs of men traversing the mountainside, wading deep into a river, and gathered in small groups to pose with pickaxes, shovels, and a couple of barrels of black powder. A series of photographs were taken from a vantage point somewhere northwest of the town and showed progress on the construction of the Commodore Hotel. Wyatt had captured not simply the history of the community in his work, but the industry of its citizens. What he’d done was nothing less than a labor of love.
It wasn’t the camera’s eye she was admiring. It was his.
“I didn’t think you would ever let me know you,” she said quietly, carefully replacing the photographs. She raised her eyes to meet his and simply held his gaze. “But this is your soul.”
He said nothing, gave nothing away.
Rachel leaned over the chest and took his hand in hers. “Come to bed with me, Wyatt.”
Chapter Eleven
Rachel led Wyatt into their bedroom. She lighted the lamp on the table closest to her side of the bed and drew the curtains closed. “Is this all right?” she asked.
Watchin
g her closely, he made no reply except to nod his head.
Rachel stood in front of him and angled her face upward. She slipped her hands under his suspenders and slid them off his shoulders, then laid her hands flat against his chest. His heartbeat drummed against her open palm.
Wyatt caught her wrists, held her there. His voice was rough, husky, the words escaping through lips that hardly moved. “Don’t do this if you don’t mean it, Rachel. I won’t go back to living like some damn monk tomorrow.”
In answer, she moved her hands to cup his face and raised herself on tiptoe. “I don’t want that, either,” she whispered. “I never wanted it.”
In any circumstance in which her lips were not a hairsbreadth from his, Wyatt would have argued the point, but that was not among the twelve or twenty things he wanted to do right now. Still, he held his ground and let her close the distance to him.
Rachel’s mouth settled softly on his, kissing him first at one corner, then moving across his lips until they parted. Taking her time, she nibbled at his lips. Their mouths bumped, clung, then parted damply. She teased him with the tip of her tongue, running it along the sensitive underside of his upper lip. She felt a tremor in his solid frame and drew back. Her hands fell away from his face to rest on his shoulders, then slid lower so her thumbs flicked the buttons on his shirt.
“May I?”
He offered a jerky nod.
Her fingers moved deftly over the front of his shirt, unfastening the buttons and parting the material just enough to make equally quick work of his union suit. Her hands stilled only after they were flush to his skin, and even then it was a temporary state. She traced the puckered scar at his shoulder and the longer one on his chest wall. His skin was warm, the flesh firm and smooth. When she pressed against him with her fingertips, he leaned into her, and his strength was comforting, not overwhelming. Not frightening.
Rachel’s fingers trailed to the waistband of his trousers. Her knuckles brushed his hard belly and when he sucked in a breath, there was just enough room for her to slip her fingertips between his skin and his fly. She made a half circle, ending at the small of his back, then brought her other hand around in the same fashion. She stepped as close to him as she could, inching her soft kid shoes between his boots. His erection pressed against her. She pressed back.